![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'd Like To Thank You, Herbert Hoover...
Jun. 25th, 2008 05:34 pmThe downside of reviewing is that you don't always have time to read what you want to because you need to be at least skimming what you have to review. Which is why I'm stealing glances at a fascinating book that I must soon put down: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor. I'm finding it both fascinating and encouraging. Fascinating, because it's well written. Encouraging, because for all the discussion of how Bush is running the country into the ground, this is a book about how America was even worse off and climbed back up again. I hadn't realized what a bubble boy Hoover was, insisting that the Government had no right nor reason to step in to help anyone but big business, insisting that the Depression was "over," and insisting that people were just fine... while 1/4 of the country was out of work and starving to death, and those who had jobs were barely holding on with neither rights nor protections.
pp. 23-24: Hoover believed the scientific application of enlightened business principles could improve the lot of workers and still leave room for profits at the top. As a Quaker, he believed in social responsibility. As an engineer, he believed it could be achieved according to a blueprint. Finally, as a lifelong Republican, he saw little role for the government in this design. Business and industry, organized under the proper influences, could do it all provided they had the information on which to act. The national government waged war and conducted foreign and economic policy, but virtually its only domestic role was to compile the necessary information for business and industry and bring it to the attention of leaders in the private sector.
But the more things stay the same, the more they change. Page 71: [Hoover] defended balancing the budget, ensuring the sound credit of the government, continuing protective tariffs, and maintaining the gold standard that tied the money in circulation to the nation's gold reserves. For the Republicans these were absolutes, as fundamental as the Constitution.
I will leave it to the reader to decide what it says about me that this is pleasure reading.
ETA: On an only tangentially related subject, The New Adventures of Queen Victoria continues to rock my surreal socks.
pp. 23-24: Hoover believed the scientific application of enlightened business principles could improve the lot of workers and still leave room for profits at the top. As a Quaker, he believed in social responsibility. As an engineer, he believed it could be achieved according to a blueprint. Finally, as a lifelong Republican, he saw little role for the government in this design. Business and industry, organized under the proper influences, could do it all provided they had the information on which to act. The national government waged war and conducted foreign and economic policy, but virtually its only domestic role was to compile the necessary information for business and industry and bring it to the attention of leaders in the private sector.
But the more things stay the same, the more they change. Page 71: [Hoover] defended balancing the budget, ensuring the sound credit of the government, continuing protective tariffs, and maintaining the gold standard that tied the money in circulation to the nation's gold reserves. For the Republicans these were absolutes, as fundamental as the Constitution.
I will leave it to the reader to decide what it says about me that this is pleasure reading.
ETA: On an only tangentially related subject, The New Adventures of Queen Victoria continues to rock my surreal socks.
